I would like some minor ship design features

GSB2 GSB2 Gratuitous Discussion
1

I just grabbed a copy of this last night, and I’m having fun so far. I haven’t really designed that many ships yet. Actually, I’ve designed one, but I can tell this is going to be something I like doing. It’s also something I would like to have improvements in.

I’d like more space in the ship designer, specifically in the front and back of a hull. I like my spaceships to have a large drive section on the back. Most real spsaceships today devote a lot of mass and space to the drive sections. I’d liike to build stuff like that.

Secondly, I’d like the grid to make more sense. Right now, it doesn’t. In particular, I can’t center ANYTHING. I’d like the ability to snap parts to any of the four cardinal directions of any other part, including the main hull of the ship. It would be cool to be able to center things liked the cockpit of a fighter to the hull I’m attaching it to. Another issue I have with the grid is that the snapping is off. Parts snap to the grid a second time after I let go of them, moving them slightly. What’s the point of the grid if it does that?

Thirdly - Fine movement controls. If holding shift while pressing the arrow keys gave me pixel-perfect movement of visuals, I would be so happy. You don’t even know.

Of course, I did just pick up this game, so maybe some of this is already possible, and I just don’t know how to do it. That would be cool. Is that the case for any of these things?

2

Those are all opinions I also share about the editor.

Additionally, I would also like spinning composites to not be broken, and an easy method to rearrange turret placement and firing arcs.

3

So basically you want to design your ships in Visio. Actually, yeah, count me in for that one too.

To give yourself space for a properly big juicy engine (and it’s uniquely coloured flare/burn) you could ‘hide’ the ship model and build from scratch. However, I agree, some of the Terran models go right to the top and bottom of the window and you can’t extend above/below the ship. Perhaps the easiest way to address this would be to allow the ship hull to be resized using the mouse wheel, as the parts can - that way we could shrink the hull, add some evil accoutrements on the front-end and a stupidly big engine on the back but still have it fit neatly into the predefined “a cruiser is this big” window.

I appreciate that might leave the weapon modules shooting from unexpected parts of the ship but I’d rather design around that than cope with the current limitations.

4

I just want more precision in the editor, that’s all.

The gold standard for spaceship design games for me was a free game called Battleships Forever

It’s got an incredible ship editor, and the last version of the game that was released allowed users to import their own sprites for hull bits.

It also had pixel-perfect placement of parts. (Try saying that three times fast!)

5

Just spotted this as I was testing the latest patch (1.36). I’ll check in this feature today :smiley:

6

Forget the shift-key-fine-movement.
Can we have numeric values for X and Y axis placement of components, like we currently have for Z axis, object angle, and other fields? That would allow infinitely fine adjustments to object placement. If you add in some reference points for the hulls (exact center, zero axis for X, zero axis for Y), we’ll be able to center components and move them around with a lot more precision.

7

Building on that… can we please type numbers in directly, rather than relying solely only on a slider?

I’ve never understood why software programs in general, not just games, will implement sliders that cover numbers that go into the hundreds or thousands but have no way to type a number in manually. If you want to get a specific number out of a slider that goes all the way from -100 to +1000, well… good luck.